Our new Indie Games subforum is now open for business in G&T. Go and check it out, you might land a code for a free game. If you're developing an indie game and want to post about it, follow these directions. If you don't, he'll break your legs! Hahaha! Seriously though.

Our rules have been updated and given their own forum. Go and look at them! They are nice, and there may be new ones that you didn't know about! Hooray for rules! Hooray for The System! Hooray for Conforming!

So I've spent about...a month or so, dicking around with the +games. Having never really had facebook, I "missed out" on the whole farmville bullshit, so I was always curious to see why these things were attracting so much press.
Wow. I can see why real gamers hate these things. If I had the capability 10+ years ago to *not* spend my entire summer doing the KOTR materia quest, and instead just buy the orb for $10 in June? I would have done it in a heartbeat. But these things take it to the max fucking level and let you spend Real Bucks to complete *any* objective that is giving you the smallest of annoyance of difficulty.
Even that would be entirely fine if it was still optional. Some nerds just have money to burn. But these things are designed with the idea that you *have* to buy something in order to make the game playable. Reaching level 10 in these is more akin to Lvl10 in say...AD&D than any current rpg.
And the bullshit "social" aspect is the thing that gets me the most
"Hey, be my neighbor in City Of Wonder!"
"Okay, do we team up or anything?"
"No! We never even see each other, and have no real-time interaction whatsoever! But here, have a pitance amount of our version of money."

also!
- You can now join Hangouts from your mobile device if you have a front-facing camera
- Hangouts now support Livestream-like broadcasting that anyone can watch
- Hangouts also support iSketch-like group drawing, along with document sharing

I wonder what it's like for the G+ team, to work so hard on a really decent product that just can't gain traction

like, at this point I would think they're all dusting off their resumes and sending them out

Bullshit. It just went public. No reasonable person expected G+ to become a leading social interface overnight. It'll take some time, but if it does succeed there will be a tipping point where it will suddenly gain a great deal of traction very quickly. Plenty of people are already on G+, many of them just aren't using it much because many of their friends are still using FB. All it will take is for enough people to shift over to using G+ primarily and then people will stop complaining about how dead it is because generally for social apps, people are sheep. I don't mean that as an insult, but it's funny that people are complaining that G+ is dead when they themselves aren't using it. If you like G+, use it more and more people will start to use it more also.

I wonder what it's like for the G+ team, to work so hard on a really decent product that just can't gain traction

like, at this point I would think they're all dusting off their resumes and sending them out

Bullshit. It just went public. No reasonable person expected G+ to become a leading social interface overnight. It'll take some time, but if it does succeed there will be a tipping point where it will suddenly gain a great deal of traction very quickly. Plenty of people are already on G+, many of them just aren't using it much because many of their friends are still using FB. All it will take is for enough people to shift over to using G+ primarily and then people will stop complaining about how dead it is because generally for social apps, people are sheep. I don't mean that as an insult, but it's funny that people are complaining that G+ is dead when they themselves aren't using it. If you like G+, use it more and more people will start to use it more also.

And with Facebook's recent "improvements" its about to get a whole lot busier.

I feel like I should tweet more, but i k ow all I'd tweet about are dumb tv shows that no one cares about and it would just be the worlds saddest twitter stream, screaming about nothing in the digital ether like a hobo in the subway

I feel like I should tweet more, but i k ow all I'd tweet about are dumb tv shows that no one cares about and it would just be the worlds saddest twitter stream, screaming about nothing in the digital ether like a hobo in the subway